Results
from last Sunday's election at the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas (and its
branch in Oklahoma City) have yet to be officially announced, but it's safe
to predict that Rev. Dr. Jo Hudson will win the congregation's endorsement
as senior pastor to the largest gay, lesbian, and transgender congregation
in the world. When linked to the November general election of Lupe Valdez
as Dallas County Sheriff, the election of Dr. Hudson this week may not
signal a clear trend toward lesbian leadership in North Texas, but it is
another pathmarker in hard country, and therefore a sign worth noting.

“Dr.
Hudson, where are you?” asks the famous Mennonite pacifist John K. Stoner on
a recent Friday evening from the podium of the Cathedral of Hope. In the
pews, there are about 100 of us, and we're all looking around for new
leadership. Hudson raises her hand from the middle of the cavernous
sanctuary, where she sits with her partner, the couple visually marked out
by their matching leather jackets. “Welcome to your church Dr. Hudson!”
jokes Stoner as the audience chuckles along.

Stoner,
with 30 years of peace activism behind him, is working on a project named
Every Church a Peace Church (ECAPC), and this is his first official try at
converting the religious economy of Texas into a peace faith. If ever there
was a peace church ready to bloom, it would be the Cathedral of Hope. Since
1970, this congregation has grown from a Metropolitan Community Church of 12
members into the freestanding phenomenon that it is today (with live
attendance in Dallas now about 1,500 per week and many more who watch on the
web). Some day soon this sanctuary of white stone will become a full-time
peace center, as the church grows again into a planned 11-story structure,
designed by the late Philip Johnson. Hudson, the soon-to-be Senior Pastor
looks around at the applauding crowd, smiling.

“And
where is Dan Peeler?” asks Stoner. Peeler is Minister of Children and
Families at the Cathedral and a member of the church's Order of St. Francis
and St. Clare. We'll see the order again Saturday afternoon during closing
services, dressed in long brown robes, reading prayers from Buddhist,
Moslem, African, and Native American traditions, lighting candles, giving
out peace stones. They handle the logistical work of this conference,
answering emails, covering the registration table, and generally moving
folks from one thing to the next.

“Whose
voice are you listening to these days?” asks Stoner. “Whose voice do you
trust?” The audience feels the problem, responds with a few long groans. So
Stoner quotes Martin Luther King Jr., a still trustworthy voice. It's okay
to talk about long white robes in heaven, said King once upon a time, so
long as we get shoes on people's feet down here.

Next up
is Baritone Anthony Brown, who sings the barefoot songs of America, created
back in the day when fiery white preachers shouted long sermons about white
robes, but couldn't care less who had shoes. African American spirituals
answered that insanity with self-centering resistance, singing right through
the official religions of slavery. Talk about no time like the present? Is
it any wonder that the psychotherapist professor of social science, who now
teaches at a Mennonite community college in Kansas, feels the relevance of
his songs returning?

Primordial nature is what Professor Brown says his songs intone. Raw faith
is what it sounds like to me: a defiant commitment to something nowhere in
sight yet everywhere necessary, like freedom in 1805, justice in 1905, or
peace today. Singing, “Oh Lord, waitin on you; Can't do nothin til the
spirit comes,” Brown breathes the prayer of an entire people who during the
last election went 88 percent the other way. Without mystery or surprise,
Brown's singing bears witness to steadfastness. I find it impossible to
suppress an association with Paul Robeson. Next time white folks ask out
loud, where are the people of color in our coalitions, I will have a simpler
answer. Ever listen to yourself sing?

Next up
is Michael Westmoreland-White the gregarious Baptist peace activist and
outreach coordinator for ECAPC who once as a young soldier memorized the
Sermon on the Mount (blessed are the meek, the merciful, and the
peacemakers) until the words sunk in so deep that the military discharged
him. His job tonight is to introduce the keynote speaker, but he says a few
words about his own autobiography of pacifism first and how he came out of
the Anabaptist tradition of peace churches, inspired by writings of the late
John Howard Yoder whose 1972 book on The Politics of Jesus is most
highly revered.

And so
it is time for Professor Glen H. Stassen, son of the same Harold Stassen who
in 1943 resigned from his third term as Minnesota Governor to join the Navy
and then after World War II helped to organize the United Nations as a way
to deter war. For son Glen, who is Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller
Theological Seminary in Pasadena, there is a personal pain that he feels
watching the current President tear down the international institutions that
elder Stassen helped to build. Will history redeem the futile image of the
father's later career whose incessant campaigns for president are best known
by the years he did not run? Son Glen has organized impressive arguments
why the internationalist route proposed by the Stassen family should yet be
preferred.

Stassen
begins with local history. The Dallas Peace Center, founded in 1981 by the
Peace Mennonite Church was first of its kind in the country. (In the house
tonight is Peace Center director Lon Burnham who doubles as a state
representative from Fort Worth and Pastor Dick Davis of the Peace Mennonite
Church.) Stassen then points south toward the city of Waxahachie, home of
the Pentecostal Peace Fellowship, which with a name like that is bound to be
out spreading word. So really, quips Stassen, this is peace country!
Thanks to Stassen we can see a few more path-markers on our way.

“We have
a better answer,” says Stassen, previewing the central thesis of his talk.
As a scholar of Christian Ethics for decades, Stassen's central insight is
that ethics of prohibition do not work. In the Sermon on the Mount for
example he finds a subtle structure of advice that instead of saying stop
that, encourages profound alternative choices. So instead of the peace
movement saying no war, no violence, no bombs, there should be persistent
pleas for making alternative choices. Every time we say we have a better
answer, we have a better chance of convincing more people to listen.

His life
work as a scholar has come to fruition around a theory called “just
peacemaking,” designed conceptually as an alternative to “just war.”
Stassen's first book-length treatment of just-peacemaking theory was
published in 1992, and it bears the marks of fresh frustration from not
being able to stop father Bush from starting the First Gulf War. Back then,
the peace community again got caught chanting a simple no war prohibition,
when already we should have known better than that.

As if
memories of Gandhi and King weren't enough to teach us that peacemaking is
about a persistent program of active alternatives, the world had more
recently witnessed a Revolution of Candles powerful enough to dismantle the
Berlin wall. Stassen was there when that happened. And like many
contemporaries, he watched news reports of similar achievements in
nonviolence history as Marcos was removed from the Philippines and the Shah
from Iran. Couldn't those same methods have been used against Hussein of
Iraq? There was a better way.

As a
two-time wrestling champion, Stassen says it is important that people come
to feel secure in their own strength so that they are not afraid to appear
weak from time to time. Just peacemaking, says Stassen, requires leadership
that can clearly acknowledge personal responsibility for things that go
wrong. Leaders who are afraid to appear weak, who need to blame everything
on someone else, who always see the world in terms of evil others and pure
selves--those leaders make lousy peacemakers. From sounds the audience is
making, Stassen knows they know who he's talking about.

In
contrast to leaders today, who bully and bomb, Stassen is quite seriously
encouraging policy commitments motivated by the Sermon on the Mount, guided
by modesty, mercy, purity of heart, and peacemaking. Such leadership would
be international in outreach and interdependent, not like the
treaty-smashing, UN-bashing unilateralists that crowd our television screens
these days.

Consider
the contrast between Turkish approaches to the Kurds and Russian responses
to the Chechnyans, two examples of Muslim inspired independence movements.
In Chechnya, says Stassen, we see a scorched-earth policy of strong
leadership that never wavers from its appearance of rock-hard masculinity.
Yet the terrorism continues. In Turkey, on the other hand, we find a
doubling of per-capita spending in Kurdish neighborhoods, engagement with
Kurdish tribal structures, and a parliament where Kurdish representatives
exceed their proportional numbers. In this case, terrorism has receded.

But we
can't reward the terrorists like that! Stassen imitates the slogan of
reaction. But addressing grievances of people does not assist terrorists.
When grassroots get their needs met through constructive channels, it is the
terrorists who wither away. Continue to stomp the people, says Stassen, and
daily you drive new people into the terrorists' arms. Just look at Israel.

Another
pathmarker worth noting: Sojourners editor Jim Wallis has been on tour in
Texas lately promoting his bestsellter book on God's Politics,
arguing that the right is all wrong about religion. In Austin, for example,
Wallis drew a standing-room crowd. Of all places to meet, Stassen and
Wallis wind up together in Waco. They were up until one in the morning
Central Baptist Time talking about Christian ethics. Sometimes you want to
be a fly on the wall. Did they talk about Reno and Koresh?

“I'm so
glad Glen deals with all these details, putting things together in a very
linear way,” says Karen Horst Cobb, the Santa Fe artist who has become a
global internet sensation for her Common Dreams article last October
entitled “No Longer a Christian.” She is responding to Stassen's talk,
explaining why she has moved beyond religion into peacemaking.

“You
know the first time he came, people were expecting that Christ would be a
conqueror; there were so many who missed Jesus because of their preconceived
notions," says Cobb. “And when I hear the talk about End Times today, I
think that again people may be letting their preconceived ideas get in the
way. The Bible says pretty clearly that Jesus is the Prince of Peace.” On
Saturday afternoon, Cobb will return to the podium to present her nonlinear
message, that fear of isolation is our root problem. To address it, she
will argue, we most crucially need courage for deeper love.

During
question period for Stassen a Lutheran minister speaks of his efforts to
resist the mad, self-righteous blindness and pall that lately have been
coming out of his people, as if something lurking within them has been
turned loose. And now the headlines say we're not going to attack Iran,
yet? The minister wants to know, is there any way that we can get a
vaccination for this?

Stassen
says he had made a careful study of public opinion in times of war. This
hysteria always marks the first phase, and it is fed in three ways. For 20
percent of the people, nationalism is enough of a motivation. Just talk
about our need to band together as a nation. Another seventeen percent
defer to presidential authority, and this number quickly doubles as soon as
troops are involved, because then they support the president and his
troops. Finally, another sixteen percent are motivated by fear of threat,
which takes you to about 53 percent majority in favor of war before the
troops are shipped off.

To just
say no in the face of this mob will never work. You have to argue that
there is a better way. Stassen says the argument for more weapons
inspection worked well enough during the buildup to Iraq and people were
sufficiently persuaded to let the weapons inspectors do their jobs. Then
the official motive for war shifted to displacing a dictator for democracy.
Although Stassen doesn't finish the point this evening, he has said enough
to imagine how the peace movement might have said, we have a better way for
this, too.

When the
war administration shifted its rationale to displacing a dictator, there was
no international institution similar to the weapons inspection structure
that could stand up and say give us a chance to do that. So the anti-war
movement got caught defending Iraq's sovereign right to dictatorship. We
just said no war. Yet, we already knew enough about Berlin, Marcos, and the
Shah to make a credible case that dictator displacement is also possible
through concerted nonviolent means. When the administration shifted its
argument to bringing democracy to Iraq, we could have said there is a better
way.

But the
people are simply brainwashed argues another questioner. What can be done
until the whole bunch have been completely re-educated? In every church,
answers Stassen, a small group can get to work right away. It only takes a
few people to call regular meetings, talk about just peacemaking, invite
speakers, communicate with other peace groups, and this kind of activity
makes a difference. These few people can begin the process of taking Jesus
back from those who have hijacked him.

What
about Afghanistan? asks another activist. Again, we could have talked about
a better way of confronting terrorism, one that does not kill innocent
civilians, a policing approach combined with humanitarian development. And
Iraq today? Stassen has just completed a long memo to Peace Action arguing
that “just get out” is the moral equivalent of “just say no” and it just
won't work. Instead, we need to speak of a better way, one that recovers
internationalist commitments to the United Nations and human rights.

Used to
be a time, Stassen reminds us, when he could teach Southern Baptist seminary
students and argue that there are two kinds of religion: authoritarian and
compassionate. And he could of course encourage them toward the
compassionate kind. But these days the Southern Baptists won't hear it
anymore. In fact, says Stassen, the Baptists have become the new KGB, the
secret police of the 21st Century. Don't call them, they'll call
you. Reagan and Gorbachev were two people Stassen could work with, but the
Southern Baptists today? They are impossible.

* * *

The gift
shop at the Cathedral of Hope is open late Friday night, selling lots of
books by Stassen that he signs at a high, round table. I also need some
anniversary gifts in my bag when I arrive home tomorrow, so I grab lots of
heart-shaped things. How handy this is for me. Books and hearts. Next
stop is the Kinkos on Oak Lawn to make flyers for tomorrow, and a late-night
snack at Lucky's Café. Between Kinko's and Lucky's I make a wrong turn and
wind up on smooth streets lined with mansions. On your next trip to Dallas
I would recommend this haphazard tour: Cathedral of Hope, gift shop, and
Lucky's Café for your spiritual, consumer, and nutritional needs. And why
not check out the mansions? They give you something to think about, too.

Saturday
morning they're playing gospel music at listener supported KNON 89.3 FM. I'm
looking head on at a bright yellow city bus headed for the Martin Luther
King Jr. Center as I listen to a song that assures me this is only a test.
Based on a message that I find today at Gospelflava.com, I take it that this
is the song by Bishop Larry Trotter and the Sweet Holy Spirit Combined
Choirs of Chicago from their album What's to Come is Better than What's
Been. All the great American music comes out of here, you know.

Never
would have been a blues had there not been a gospel first. And had there
never been a blues, well, forget it.

I'm
pondering the meaning of this gospel test as I travel East along Inwood,
where a towering medical center on the north side of the street looks down
upon a tiny liquor store on the south side. Thinking about this is enough to
keep me distracted until I sit down at a hamburger stand for my
biscuit-sandwich breakfast. When a slinky young woman in pink hair and
t-shirt steps in front of the drink counter to pose like a goddess, I try
not to choke. The guy with her is dressed for business with sharp tied tie,
and the two of them keep me busy concentrating on the biscuit. Today is my
28th anniversary for Christ's sake. I bought hearts last night. There is a
better way, I persuade myself. Just eat the biscuit.

I have
one more errand to run along Inwood. The clerk is keeping me busy with small
chat until he asks me what brings me to town. It's a conference I say, at
the Cathedral of Hope. He freezes. You know that church right there, and I
point over his shoulder. His eyes narrow and he nods his head a terse two
degrees. And to me, he never says another word. Running a little late by
now, I shake hands very briefly at the registration table and already hear
Washington DC activist Damu Smith speaking in mid-lecture, trying to wake
everybody up.

* * *

“I'm
proud to be an activist for Christ!” says Smith, speaking not from the
pulpit, but from the floor at the head of the center aisle. Dressed in
full-length purple dashiki, he's chipping away at this Saturday morning
audience of white peace activists, determined to find a thing of beauty in
here before he's done.

“The
four Gospels read like an action movie,” chimes Smith. “You see, Jesus is
not just feeding people on an individual level, but he's feeding the
multitudes. He's transforming public policy!” His rendition of the text
draws some laughs. “I mean, soup kitchens are a nice thing to do, but what
we want is the kind of church that can't wait until the day comes that soup
kitchens are not needed! The kind of world that pays people livable wages so
they don't have to work two, three, or four jobs the way some people are
working now!”

The
audience is waking up. People running this country today are people who do
not believe in worker justice, but that's anti-Christ, says Smith. That's
got nothing to do with Jesus. And this means that peace from a Jesus
perspective is not only the absence of war, but the presence of justice. So
if we want to talk about true peace, we have to talk about affordable
housing. In D.C. for example new homes are going on the market for
$350,000, so let me ask you what's that for?

“Not for
the poor!” answers a voice from the audience.

“Not for
the poor?” exclaims Smith. “That's not even for the working people. Forget
the poor, that's not even for the middle class!” Smith describes a modest
apartment that goes to rent for $1,700 per month. “So people are living in
cars, hotels, streets, and what do they do when they have to live like
this? When they are forced to live in these compressed circumstances and
stressed communities? What do they do? Well, not everyone is reaching out
to the Lord.”

“So
Black Voices for Peace is yes talking about peace between Israel and
Palestine, and yes talking about peace in Iraq, and yes talking about peace
in Haiti and the Congo, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. But yes we're also
talking about bringing peace to the ghettoes and slums at home, to build a
World House like a tent over which we can construct the beloved community.”
Smith has sailed, of course, into pure King, so he talks about the need to
read the whole King, the whole Testament of Hope, the inward journey, the
outward journey, the triple evils of racism, poverty, and war, so that we
understand what it means to have a true revolution of values, and a true
movement for peace.

“YOUR
friend George Bush,” Smith taunts the audience. These are Texas white folks,
are they not? So if George Bush has friends, these must be them, right? But
Smith does not hold this audience to that hot plate. Has George Bush ever
BEEN to the Cathedral of Hope to be fed? Smith laughs. To be fed with the
word? The audience grins back. But there's one thing George Bush has that
the peace movement needs right now. George Bush has an agenda. Not like the
peace movement, where we go into one room to talk about peace, another room
to talk about affordable housing, another for welfare reform, and never the
twain shall meet! What we need is a World House agenda and this means
demilitarize, but it also means putting money into affordable housing, jobs,
and the concept of justice.

Smith
also references the statement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that
we're not going to war against Iran, not just yet. We're living in dangerous
times, one of the most dangerous periods in the history of the earth, and
people in charge are going around with beliefs that are going to keep us in
eternal danger. With conflict all around them, they use language that
provokes.

In his
State of the Union Address, Bush talks about Syria and Iran as evil, but
what do people see? Smith asks. They see Palestinian children being blown
apart and nothing happening to Israel. No matter how many Palestinian homes
get bulldozed or children shot, our nation can never find its way to
criticize these things, and that's unfair. We're not asking for Bush to
declare solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, because that will never
happen in a million years, but Mr. Bush, pleads Smith, can you be fair? If
we're going to build the beloved community, at least we can tell the truth
about what's happening. Smith is chipping away. Time for the King chisel
again.

A
revolution of values is needed in this nation whose leaders continue to use
threatening and belligerent language that puts the whole world on edge. A
revolution of values is needed in a nation that is materially the most
prosperous but spiritually the most impoverished. How can we be moral
leaders of the world supporting South Africa all those years while
boycotting Cuba? How can we offer moral leadership to the world when we
send landmines to Afghanistan and Angola with labels that say made in the
USA, blowing up children and causing the highest rates of amputation in the
world? What kind of moral leadership is that?

People
of faith have got to be passionate about speaking for truth. Fifty eight
percent of white folks voted for Bush and 89 percent of Black folks voted
against him. And it's not genetic! Smith draws a burst of laughter for
this. No it's not genetic, it's experiential. My ancestors came on slave
ships, packed like sardines, thrown overboard when they got too sick, just
tossed into the ocean, captured into slavery and brutalized by the police.
When you have that kind of experience, you tend to think a little
differently about things. When you think about four little girls being
blown up in Birmingham, when you can't walk anywhere without being stared
at, when you watch movies from balconies, drink from separate fountains,
carry your food in an ice box while you're traveling. This is Smith's
letter from Birmingham jail. In a life of economic and racial privilege,
white folks (not everyone who is white has privilege I know that but they
do) tend to accept things a little more.

Next
time Smith comes to Dallas he wants to see Black, white, Latino, Asian,
young and old in THE SAME ROOM! Bringing folks together means getting out
more. And a life in Christ, it is NOT hanging out with people who think like
you. Jesus went to dinner with the tax collector, and people asked him
why. He said do you call the doctor to see people who are well? Two days
before the November election, Black Voices for Peace spent the day outside
the White House talking to tourists. Smith looks up at the glorious high
ceiling of the Cathedral of Hope sanctuary, and pleads, you have to get out
of this beautiful place!

George
Bush is in the White House because 60 percent of the white people put him
there. And although we can say that homophobia and abortion played a part,
the election was mostly a widespread referendum on Bush policies. Although
Smith has been quoting King all morning, I begin to hear subtext from
Malcolm X, the famous instruction he gave an eager college student: go back
to your neighborhood and work on white folks. White peace activists have
neither mobilized a majority of white folks nor turned out a minority of
others for their compartmentalized movement. Smith has been about as
diplomatic as he can be, and he promises to come back to help. But there is
such a gap.

* * *

During
lunch break Peace Mennonite Pastor Dick Davis is introducing me to a swirl
of Dallas activists, and I hand out some flyers that I made last night at
Kinkos. The Veterans for Peace table is staffed by someone who flew down
from Minnesota, and when I sit down to eat, I meet Moravians from
Pennsylvania. Moravians, they explain to me, belong to a pre-Reformation
peace church, founded upon the ashes of martyr John Huss who died singing in
1415.

“So what
are you doing here,” they ask me, glancing at my flyers from the War
Resisters League. “Isn't the War Resisters League secular?” I almost say
socialist, too, but decide to swallow the provocation with my lunch. I'm a
sympathetic secularist I explain. I take a William James approach to
religious experience. We all have some kind of faith, I think. The fourth
person at our table is a beaming activist from Dallas, and lunch passes very
quickly.

* * *

For the
afternoon breakout session, I will look for Professor Jeff Dumas, leading
expert on the problem of military conversion. In fact, I recruited Professor
Dumas into this gig so that I could sit here and take notes. We are
assigned to a room in the children's wing. Everyone who enters says
something about the bright colors. Dumas needs no flair to keep his
listeners engaged for the next hour. No notes, no slides, no handouts. He
barely moves his hands or his voice. He just has this mind that turns out
quiet but thoughtful words.

Dumas
picked up his scholarly interest in military conversion from the founder of
the field, the late Seymour Melman of Columbia U (see
aftercapitalism.com). And some kind of fate has planted Dumas here. If
the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex were a state, it would rank in third or
fourth place in its ability to attract military contracts.

Dating
back to researches begun during the Vietnam era, Dumas finds two main
reasons why people support military spending. They think it makes them safe,
and they think it's good for the economy. But military spending is making
the world much more dangerous, says Dumas, and military spending is only
good for certain vested interests. In searching for alternatives to military
spending we are seeking to remove obstacles to peace. But we also have to
address public anxieties about the damage they fear after the flow of
military dollars has been cut off.

People
see the bases, the workplaces, and the paychecks that come with military
spending, says Dumas, but they don't see how military spending causes the
industrial base of an economy to shrink or how this shrinkage in turn
contributes to huge trade deficits. Military spending is turning our economy
into a second rate economy and the administration is making the world more
dangerous. When people fear the conversion of a military economy, it's
because they can see what they will be losing: “The abstraction of after is
harder to see.”

The
Pentagon's own data on base closings demonstrate that when military spending
is converted to a civilian economy, more jobs are created. We hear planes
right now landing at nearby Love Field, a one-time military base that has a
long and prosperous history as a center of growth for civilian enterprise.
Likewise with the old Bergstrom Air Force Base at Austin, now home of the
Barbara Jordan terminal. Says Dumas: “We don't even know the examples that
we are sitting on top of.”

At the
end of World War II, one third of the national economy of the USA was
militarized, and it was successfully reconverted into a booming civilian
economy. A lot of planning went into that effort, not by pacifists, but by
corporate leaders who wanted economic growth. Today, says Dumas, the
challenge is both easier and harder. It's easier because there are fewer
industries to convert, but harder because the vested interests that most
need converting are not “going back” to their civilian activities. Since the
Korean War, the USA has developed a permanent war economy. Converting this
economy presents both psychological problems and concrete issues.

The
world of military research and production is totally different from the
civilian kind. Military engineers design primarily for maximum performance
in specialty areas. Military engineers don't focus on cost. In the
military, if a project is funded, the costs will be covered. In civilian
life, of course, cost is very important. Also, military engineers are often
asked not to think about their place in the larger plans. They just work on
their compartmentalized projects.

The
story of two refrigerators: Dumas goes shopping and finds two refrigerators
priced $150 apart. What's the difference? he asks the salesman. Why this
refrigerator here is made from space age plastic strong enough to re-enter
the atmosphere! In other words, it's a military refrigerator.

Is
military work inherently more interesting? That's an argument Dumas hears
from time to time. So he tells the story of the English aerospace engineer
who met a child with spina bifida and built a little vehicle for him to play
in. That project, says the aerospace engineer, was the most satisfying and
interesting challenge of his life. But what about the size of civilian
paychecks? Well yes, answers Dumas, military contractors who turn civilian
do have to give up about ten to twenty percent of their income.

One more
story: in 1996, Dumas was hired by the famous nuclear lab at Los Alamos to
prepare for conversion to civilian life, and they found a civilian problem
to work on. The plastics engineers at Los Alamos would work on methods of
plastic production that would eliminate toxic waste. Green plastic? Go
figure. As soon as the project was announced, guess what happened?
Congress cut the funding.

Meanwhile, Congress continues to fund weapons programs that the Pentagon
itself has been trying to cut. Even the most conservative constituencies can
be reached with these facts, says Dumas. Congress cuts productive research
programs on the one hand as it funds useless weapons elsewhere. Dumas has
developed quite a bit of expertise here in Texas talking to conservative
audiences about military conversion. There is no need to assume, he says,
that the work can't be done: “I know you can do this,” he says. “I know
this can be done.”

In
conversation between elders at the table, several of them Mennonites, a
consensus emerges that the European Union is the economic force to watch
these days, where a much more intelligent mix of social and military
policies is going to prove that the USA, in the grip of its own paranoid
fantasies of evil, is choosing a second-rate path. Because winning a war
against terrorism, says Dumas, has nothing to do with the size of the
military. In the near term, terrorism is best fought through superb
intelligence and diligent police work. In the long term (like Stassen said
last night) the most effective policies against terrorism involve resolute
commitments to human rights and development.

Conversation continues at the table, way past time. Dumas is conducting a
masterful seminar and people are reluctant to go. So it is no reflection on
the fine presentation by Karen Horst Cobb that I arrive back in the
sanctuary late and tired. I hear what she is saying about love, the
centrality of love, the way we have not paid enough attention to it. There
is a deeper conversion at stake, a revolution of values, a profound
choosing. I stare into a candle that I hold and listen to the prayers that
people have shared for millennia on various continents and times.

Thanks
to the Order of St. Francis and St. Clare, I pick up a smooth stone on my
way out the door. Using stones like this, Cobb has encouraged all of us to
build a Cairn, an Ebenezer, a little arrangement of stones that would
signify a pathmarker through rough country. If we build these little
pathmarkers, they will show our hope that a path to peace can be found. What
else would Jesus do?

Greg Moses is editor of the
Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience:
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. His chapter
on civil rights under Clinton and Bush appears in Dimes Worth of
Difference, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can
be reached at: gmosesx@prodigy.net.
Visit his Peacefile weblog at:
http://peacefile.org/wordpress/.